Nature: Bees: Meet our prime pollinators

21 May, 2015

Bees do far more than just make honey. Globally, the 25,000 or so bee species play a crucial part in crop production and in promoting biodiversity.

This month Nature Outlooks published a supplement focussed on bees. As part of the supplement I worked on the infographic, Meet our prime pollinators, giving an overview of the species.

What I learned was that there are a lot of bees! Honeybees and bumblebees steal the limelight a little in this species, considering they make up only a very small percentage of all the species that there are.

One of the challenges with this piece, and I believe with the whole supplement, was that there is such a dearth of data on bees. And what there is rarely agrees. There are very few researchers in the field, making it difficult to track these little critters.